DEA Wants to Fees on Doctors, Industry

Published 6:00 pm, Monday, February 10, 2003

The Drug Enforcement Administration is seeking to double fees paid by doctors, pharmacies and drug companies that are used to combat abuse of legal prescription drugs, officials said Tuesday.

The fee increase would be the first since 1993 for the DEA's diversion control program, which just emerged from a six-year court fight with the American Medical Association that set the guidelines for how the fees should be assessed and what activities they can pay for.

Doctors and pharmacies would pay $130 a year under the plan for a federal license to prescribe controlled drugs, while pharmaceutical companies would pay $1,600 a year to make the drugs. Both figures are about double the current fees.

Pat Good, a senior official with the DEA program, said Tuesday that the higher fees would bring in $118 million a year, compared with $57 million in 1993. This would account for inflation over the past decade, enable DEA to hire 39 more investigators to battle prescription drug abuse and allow for technology updates, such as a digital way for doctors and druggists to verify each other's legitimacy.

The changes would have to be approved by Congress.

There are about 15,000 controlled, legal drugs in the United States, ranging from opium-based painkillers to tranquilizers to sedatives. The DEA has come under fire recently for not doing enough to stop abuse of prescription drugs, most recently in a Justice Department inspector general's report saying more people were abusing them than were using cocaine.